Semester End: Class Archiving and Cloning

We just made a small but important feature release that Ponder teachers who are preparing for their spring semesters will appreciate:

You can now archive your classes!

Class archiving and Class cloning!

You will notice in your class settings that there are a couple of new buttons. The first is the “Archive” button. At the end of each semester, you will want to archive your classes. You and your students will still have access to all of the activity from the semester, but it will be put into storage, and frozen in time, to make room for new classes for the up-coming semester.

Archiving a class does the following:

The group selector now has a separate section for archived classes.

The class is moved to the “Archived” section of the class selector

The class is marked “Archived” in the class settings control panel

Students can no longer join the class

The class is no longer available in the response box for either students or teachers

We have additional plans for archived classes which we will ship in the coming months, but for now you have the basics. Also, when you accidentally archive the wrong class, you can of course “un-archive” it by clicking the “reinstate” button.

Have no fear, you can always reinstate an archived class

The second important feature we released is class cloning. Many of you have patiently re-created your classes from one semester to the next, or even for multiple sections of the same class. We have heard your calls for help and answered!

Once you have the reading list and themes configured for a class, the clone button will allow you to create as many more of that class as you need. For example, many of our teachers teach 4, 5 and sometimes 6 different sections of the same class. Now, once they have the reading list and course packet configured the way they would like it, and the themes created, they can simply clone it for each additional section in seconds, and then re-name the clones to match section numbers or class periods.

You can now instantly clone all of the settings of an existing or archived class!

Of course, if you accidentally clone it too many times, you can delete any extras by clicking the “remove” button. As before, if a class has any students or teachers other than you joined to it, we will prevent you from deleting it and losing your data. Once others have joined your class, archive it to make room or tidy things up.